The fact that we probably wouldn't be covering this game had Valve not caused something of a stir when they kicked it out of Steam Greenlight says something about the nature and perception of erotic games in the West. It's a genre that's something less than an afterthought, a barely existent super-niche that lurks in the shadows of the internet in the form of barely interactive adventure titles or playground MMOs designed to let your avatar bump uglies with other avatars.

Developers Miriam Bellard and Andrejs Skuja are out to try and change that, with a game that attempts to deal with eroticism in a mature fashion.

Seduce Me sets the scene in simple fashion: you are a suitably virile young man with far too much time on his hands who, upon a chance meeting with promiscuous socialite Pietra, is invited to the latter's Grecian beach-side palace for sun, sea, sand, and sex. You arrive at the enormous villa, rendered in pristine fashion by the Unity engine, to find a number of attractive women waltzing about the place - Pietra is the hot-tempered celebrity host with the most; Cecilia, a near-permanently sloshed, maneater of a blonde divorcee, on the prowl for a moneyed husband; there's Lilia, Cece's rather moody and inexperienced daughter; and Esper, a kinky maid with a laughable work ethic. There are others who can help you boost your general popularity around the mansion, but it's the four above whom the game challenges you to seduce, fulfilling them both emotionally and passionately.

What this actually entails, however, is something of a numbers game. Each of the four girls you have a shot with have a progression bar for intimacy, and one for physical attraction, the general idea being to flirt with a woman to raise the latter, and have a deep-and-meaningful to boost the former. It's not that different from your run-of-the-mill dating games in this respect, and thankfully there are no fetch quests to speak of. However, there are also no real conversation trees, with all of the key exchanges between the player character and the women floating about the house taking place through the medium of card games.

Chatting to us recently about the difficulty in getting her erotic strategy title Seduce Me to market, No Reply Games' Miriam Bellard suggested that the only way negative and prudish perceptions of the erotic market will change in this industry is by more "brave souls" making controversial content, arguing that "too much sex is better than too much violence".

Sex and games have always been uneasy bedfellows, perhaps unsurprising considering the mainstream perception of this interactive entertainment medium as something childish, and predominantly for kids and adolescents. The (entirely wrong) picture of gamers as hormonally-challenged, masturbating basement dwellers has created something of a black hole for any 'serious' erotic game here in the West, with explicit material generally reserved for giggling pubescent boys having stolen their parents' credit cards, or sexual deviants who keep things very hush-hush.

You'd never admit to playing an erotic game, would you? Who are you, some kind of pervert?! Well, no.

Times are changing. Japan has long had dedicated relatively-mainstream stores for this sort of thing. The erotic genre as an umbrella is so large on the other side of the world that there are sub-genres to be found. Here in the West, the best thing you can hope for are poorly animated Flash adventure games on Newgrounds that typically see you button mashing to fill a bar so you can change camera angle for the money shot involving a cartoon character from that kids TV show you saw once.

No Reply are hoping to change that, although it might have been easier had Valve not rained on their parade. "It has had a profound effect on our view of the industry," No Reply's co-founder, Miriam Bellard, tells me. "We didn’t expect such a fuss. We didn’t realise it was such a big deal! A game for adults by adults - why should anyone care?" Seduce Me proved one of the most hotly debated topics on Greenlight, with plenty of champions debating the freedom of expression with the game's detractors.